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Lose Your Amazon Account and Your Kindle Dies
Mike writes "If you buy a Kindle and some Kindle ebooks from Amazon, be careful of returning items. Amazon decided that one person had returned too many things, so they suspended his Amazon account, which meant that he could no longer buy any Kindle books, and any Kindle subscriptions he's paid for stop working. After some phone calls, Amazon granted him a one-time exception and reactivated his account again." Take this with as much salt as you'd like.
Myth:
If you buy a Kindle, you are locked into Amazon's Kindle store.
Truth:
There are many sources for books that can be read on the Kindle.
Some Free Sites (Public Domain / Creative Commons)
MobileRead.com (look for .mobi books you can download to your computer or download the MobiGuide
and get your books via Whispernet)
Feedbooks.com (books can be downloaded to your computer or if you download their Kindle Guide
you can get your books via Whispernet - they even have a video on how to use the guide)
Manybooks.net (when you download to your computer, look for Kindle format or Mobipocket)
1001Books (download books to your computer or directly from your Kindle browser)
Some Pay Sites
Fictionwise.com (look for .mobi books but NOT Secure Mobipocket books)
BooksonBoard.com (register your Kindle's PID and you can download any .mobi from their Overdrive servers -
to learn more about this see the Visual Kindle Guide wiki)
Baen.com (great site for Sci-Fi books which offers free as well as low cost books)
So your Kindle is still somewhat useful. I would hope that more competition arises and Amazon removes its Kindle services from its e-book services so as to avoid a nasty inevitable anti-trust suit.
My work here is dung.
Actually, not even that's true. It's perfectly possible, and not even terribly difficult, to put non-DRM content onto a Kindle. Fictionwise will tell you how to do it, as will Baen books. Basically, losing his Amazon account just made it difficult (but not impossible) to put DRM'ed books on the Kindle. I'm not sure that's a minus..
I've wrestled with reality for 35 years and I'm happy to say, I finally won out - Elwood P. Dowd
you CAN add new things, just not from amazon. One can add non-amazon content to the Kindle
-- D-23994, Muff#2613
Please don't mod me redundant; I feel that if someone from Amazon sees this, they need to see multiple people saying it:
I too was planning on buying a Kindle, but will never do so if my ability to use it is at the whim of someone other than myself.
What use is a electronic reader if you can't add new books to read?
Honestly, I don't quite get the point either... I have a Kindle, and I have a bunch of stuff on it that didn't come from Amazon.com. Sure, it's more hassle to put things on it if you don't have a working Kindle account; you can't just pay the 10 cents each to email things directly to the device, and instead have to hook it up to the computer... but you can get legitimately free books from, say, baen.com and load them on to your heart's content. the Kindle will *read* a variety of formats, not just its own.
The most valid point the guy has is "what happened to the warranty?" Since the warranty is used by contacting Customer Service, and he no longer has that right, he can't get warranty service on his $350 electronic device, and that does suck. It could even be illegal.
But, come on, it is so NOT true that a Kindle becomes useless if you can't access the Kindle store. It's the other way around: the Kindle store is of no use if your Kindle doesn't work.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
I agree also - I was looking forward to a Kindle as my next gadget purchase. I'm actually rather tired of physical books lately. For some reason hardcovers are not a standardized height meaning bookcases end up with a lot of wasted space. Why are they all over the place? I go on reading binges when time and work allow and it's way too easy to have a pile of books but no two are the same. Storage is a pain! I'd rather just have a good electronic reader.
I can only hope the success of the Kindle and the projects like Openmoko means an open source type will come along.